A Chance for European Universities - Or: Avoiding the Looming University Crisis in Europe

Europe’s universities are very well represented among the world’s top 200 universities, but almost absent in the top 50. They are economically, culturally and socially underexploited. There is an urgent need to alter the context for European universities to strengthen the European competitive position through economic innovation, increased social cohesion and a more vibrant cultural dynamism. The unbalanced demographics in the world – with a virtually constant supply of graduates in the developed West and a potentially fast increase in the number of graduates in developing countries – pose both new threats and new opportunities for European universities. Europe can cash in on these opportunities by reinventing its higher education, taking into account the lessons learned from effective education for an international labor market, from the valorization of knowledge but also from the matching and selection of students. Jozef Ritzen outlines a series of changes necessary to make European universities more successful:|Denationalization of the Bologna process with emphasis on European-wide accreditation and quality control;|Moving the organization of universities from the bureaucratic to the innovative;|Rebalancing the financing system so that the public budget cuts of the past decades can be met by private sources.